Facial Expressions
For the facial expression task, I decided to draw three different faces, one happy, one sad and a shocked face. I picked happiness and sadness because they are likely the most common emotions and I wanted to practice those. The reason I picked shocked as the third option was to try a more expressive, challenging expression.
The first facial expression I tried drawing was the happy face. This is the one I’m most proud of out of the three. I really like the mouth I drew and the eyes, as they make the character look very happy.
by analysing faces online while drawing this, I realised that an open mouth smile like the one seen is actually much easier to draw than I first expected. I will definitely be using techniques from this in my future character designs
Next up to do was the sad face, I didn’t want to copy and paste the head shape from the previous face, so I drew a new one. The eyebrows and mouth are key in this to get the perfect sad feeling. The exaggerated frown was used to emphasise sadness and the eyes were chosen to stay open and look down, further expressing the character’s sadness.
for the last face, I drew a shocked face looking straight forward. This was the trickiest of them all, as drawing the mouth open wide like that was a challenge. I left some white area above the bottom teeth to fill in for the tongue, but I used a rough outline for it compared to the darker areas of the mouth, because it looked better for the effect I was trying to achieve than the clean lines
Overall I’m glad that I did this exercise as it helped me realise how to do some facial expressions with a good effect. I am especially happy with the happy facial expression as I think it’s very effective at converting the emotion, and I am glad that the shocked face turned out better than I had expected, and I think the effect with the rougher lines around the inside of the mouth and the tongue were effectively done, and I’m glad I made it that way compared to the cleaner line option.
In future drawings, I will be able to make the characters I draw express emotions a lot better as I have e better understanding of the face and what needs to be altered to show emotion, such as the eye shape, eyebrow location and shape, and the mouth.
